Sandbags Saddlebags & Resilience

(Run to the Rez, San Carlos, AZ. 2025)

Globe was still wet from the flood when bikers walked Broad Street to fill their poker run cards. Two weeks earlier, water had swallowed the town and pushed its way into storefronts, wrecking dreams and leaving behind mounds of debris — and ruined inventory. On Broad Street people were working, shoveling and sweeping, sorting through mud-caked shoes, and scraping away what the river had buried and tumbled.

I noticed them — and the faces streaked with sun and grit, hands raw but moving steadily, rebuilding one small corner of what had been lost. Their tools were simple: buckets, brushes, bare hands, and a will that refused to surrender. Between one block and the next, I saw what the run was about . . . caring and survival.

Both are born from the same instinct: to move when you must, to stay when you can, to meet the world with whatever you can carry.

Five times I’ve attended Run to the Rez, and each year it feels less like an event and more like a world ceremony. It’s held on Apache land, where the mountains hold their breath and prayers rise with the dust. Here, the highway center lines remain the same, but the lines are thin and growing thinner between motorcycles, spirit dancers, and drummers striking their earth beats. As the rock bands blast notes from their heavy metal guitars, and the open- throated roar of Big Twin motorcycles creates the score, the land absorbs conflict and drama, grief and flood waters, just as it always does.

Sandbags saddlebags & resilience

One bag holds back the water, the other carries what we need to keep going . . .

At Burdette Hall in San Carlos, the Veterans Honor program begins; Veterans stand quietly, respectfully, and a circle forms — riders, elders, children, wind. Someone says a prayer, and even those who don’t know the words understand the sound. A man gets up, its quiet, and he sings the National Anthem in Apache. We all know the anthem’s words, but we don’t actually know his words. But to make all of us feel good, an elder takes the stage and teaches a single word in Apache. It’s no surprise to me; efforts are made to include everyone.  

It’s a ride, yes, but it’s also a return — to gratitude, to memory, to the old ways of honoring. Across miles of desert highway, the wind speaks the only sermonic word that’s ever mattered: Remember. Biblical scholar and Rabbi Abraham Joshua Heschel said the whole of the Bible can be contained in that single word. And we do remember, we remember those who rode before us, those who fought and didn’t come home, those lost in the floods, thos who prayed for safety and found it in the roar of a thousand bikers cresting a hill together.

From every direction they come: riders heading south from the cold pines of Wisconsin, west from the mesas of New Mexico, east from the long highways of California and the Hawaiian Islands. They arrive not just to ride, but to participate in the inclusive circle of chrome and leather. That circle of respect offers a different kind of peace — a belonging not the quiet kind, but the steady kind, unspoken but loud, one that hums steadily beneath the commotion: No Nation is excluded.

Resilience isn’t loud. It’s not the splashy headline or the show. It’s the man patching the same boot for the third time. It’s the woman stacking sandbags while her house still leaks. It’s the Apache elder blessing riders who will vanish into the horizon by noon. It’s the rider keeping a cushion between himself and the world, not out of fear, but out of care — space enough for everyone to be safe, space enough for grace.

The land holds all of it: the floods, the fires, the roads that bind one year to the next. And each autumn, the riders return, tracing a map of the road less traveled, the road of welcome, the road that carries the weight and the wonder of the ancestors and all tribes.

This year, the road to San Carlos passed through water and mud and memory. We came to honor, to stand with those who rebuild, and to remind ourselves what endurance looks like. The ride ends where it always does — in gratitude, in fellowship, in the unbroken wind. And as we go forward on our two-wheeled machines of risk, entering that three percent portal, I remind my brothers and sisters to ride steady; may the road hum in tune with your goings in graces. And while you may not hear what I hear, there is a star, a star, dancing in the night and it leaves a written trail on a biker’s hat. Here, if you read on, you will see what I see in the simple but powerful phrase: We’re still here.
We still here.
We here. Still.

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